I had finally sold Winterscombe, not long after our marriage, to some educational reformers, a husband and wife who had decided that Winterscombe was the perfect base from which to revolutionize British schooling. Their reforms had not caught on; they had later sold, I heard, to a pension fund. The pension fund, I believe, later sold to a computer millionaire, who used the house as his company headquarters. Winterscombe’s capacity to adapt to time and changing circumstances was apparently endless. Now, it seemed, it had been transformed into a fashionable country-house hotel.
I looked at the photographs in disbelief. This was, and was not, Winterscombe. It had been redecorated, lavishly, by an American interior decorator I knew well. He had remade it into a grand Edwardian country house—or, rather, into everyone’s idea of such a house—at the same time incorporating every modern luxury and convenience. The cellars had been converted into a swimming pool and gymnasium that might have diverted a Caesar. The ballroom was now the restaurant. My grandfather would have loved the restoration of the billiards room: much grander than it had ever been in his day, every wall was adorned with large, gory depictions of hunting. There was a helicopter landing pad, a jogging track around the lake for jaundiced executives. Not a bedroom was without a four-poster. It was clever, and preposterous. No, no, no, I said—don’t even suggest it. We can’t take Freddie and Winnie there—they would hate it.
I was wrong. The next day, in Little Venice, Freddie and Winnie took one look at the brochure, and I knew: They loved it. Silently, I despaired. I was by no means sure I wanted to revisit Winterscombe.
“What a jolly good idea,” said Freddie.
“We’d be tickled pink,” said Winnie.
Frank telephoned, there and then: bookings were made for the coming weekend. Winnie crossed to her neat desk; in her methodical way she entered this event in her calendar. As she did so, she showed signs of new excitement. Her cheeks became pink.
“Freddie!” she said. (She shouted, in fact; Uncle Freddie had become rather deaf.) Winnie brandished the calendar; Freddie twiddled with his hearing aid.
“Freddie—imagine this! We’ll be able to watch it from Winterscombe. How splendid! That weekend. It’s visible then. It was in The Times. I made particular note of it.”
“What? What?” said Freddie. The hearing aid gave a piercing squeak.
“The comet!” Winnie replied, on a note of triumph. “Halley’s comet. That weekend is one of the times it’s visible. We’ll be able to watch it. How exciting! I missed it last time. I was with my Papa. In Peking, I think.”
“Fancy that,” said Freddie, when this information sank in. He beamed. “Twice in one lifetime. And from the same spot too. I bet there’s not many people who can say that.”
So, the next weekend, we returned to Winterscombe. Freddie and Winnie had last been there for Steenie’s funeral. Frank and I had last seen it more than seventeen years before, when we left to live in America.
The landscape had changed in Wiltshire, as it had in so many parts of England. The long lines of elm trees had gone; hedgerows had been plowed up; the nearest town, once thirty miles away, now encroached to within six miles of Winterscombe.
We drove through high gates, and for a moment—looking out over the lake and the bowl of the valley, seeing the house and the gardens in the soft light of a late winter afternoon—I thought little had changed. Then I saw this was an illusion. Winterscombe was managed now. The drive was freshly raked; all bumps and ruts had been removed; it smelled faintly of weedkiller. An attempt was being made, I think, to convey the impression that the hotel staff were old family retainers: At the house, our luggage was taken by a man wearing a garment I had not seen in forty years. He was young and zippy; he wore a green baize apron.
A man dressed in the manner of a butler greeted us distantly at reception. Reception consisted of an Edwardian partners’ desk. To check in, you signed a leather visitors’ book; the room keys bore names, not numbers. Presumably there were computers somewhere, and other technological aids, but if so they were well hidden. Rugs had been replaced upstairs by thick pile carpets. A man passed us carrying a fishing rod and complaining that the river was polluted. (It was out of season for fishing.) Another passed carrying a portable telephone. Freddie and Winnie seemed to be the only English guests; all the other accents we heard, like Frank’s and mine, were foreign.
Once we were in our bedroom and the man in the green baize apron had departed, Frank and I looked at each other.
The room, a former guest room, was huge. It was dominated by one of the reproduction four-posters. The windows were double-glazed, the radiators red-hot, the room temperature about seventy-five degrees. There were carefully chosen homogenous antiques. The pictures on the walls were safe and irreproachable. The covers on the chairs matched the quilt and the curtains. On one of the chests, arranged symmetrically, were two small bottles of complimentary sherry, a basket containing fruit under cling-wrap, some overarranged dried flowers, and a twenty-four-hour room service menu. Frank and I began to laugh.
“What would Maud say?” Frank asked. “Oh, what would Maud say?”
“I know exactly what Maud would say—and do. Maud could be the most terrific snob, but always about the oddest things. If she were here, if she came in now—you know the very first thing she’d do?”
“What?”
“This.” I pulled back the quilt on the bed and laid my hand on the pillowcase. “She’d say: ‘Oh, Victoria, this won’t do. It’s cotton, not linen.’”
We were a little delayed that evening, calling America—our son, Max, and our daughter, Hannah. When we went down to dinner that night, Freddie and Winnie were there in the hotel lounge (once the drawing room) awaiting us. They were sitting on a red velvet chesterfield, by a large log fire, attracting a number of curious stares.
Freddie was wearing a very ancient and slightly greenish dinner jacket, which had seen better days. Winnie was wearing a full-length dress that could never have been fashionable, but which had come closest to fashionability around 1940. Pinned to the front of her battleship bosom was a jet brooch the size of a coffee-cup saucer. She was wearing lipstick, which she did only on the most important occasions.
Both of them wore a look of happy and bemused expectation.
“My dear, you’ll never guess where they’ve put us,” said Winnie, in a lowered voice that could have been heard at the far end of the gardens. “The King’s bedroom, Vicky! Imagine that!”
“That’s not the best part.” Freddie was rocking with delight. “In the bathroom—in the bathroom there’s this absolutely incredible machine. You put the water in, then some of that bubble-bath stuff—”
“Which is there in the room. Free!” Winnie put in. “In sachets!”
“And then you press this switch, and whoosh! It turns into a kind of whirlpool.”
“It’s a Jacuzzi, Freddie,” I said.
“Is it?” Freddie looked very interested at this. “They have that sort of thing now, do they, in hotels? Quite extraordinary. There’s a carpet, too—in a bathroom! Well, well, well.” He paused. “Can you buy them—those Jack things? I wouldn’t mind having one at home. I said to Winnie, what a place for a murder! What would Inspector Coote make of that?”
Freddie was still talking about the Jacuzzi, to the considerable mirth of the other guests, when we went in to dinner. There, in the former ballroom, Freddie and Winnie encountered for the first time the delights of nouvelle cuisine. These impressed them rather less than the Jacuzzi.
“My goodness me,” said Freddie when he was presented with a small artwork of three different-colored mousses in the middle of a large white plate. “Is this all you get? It looks a bit like baby food. What do you think, Winnie? I seem to have a rose on my plate. Can it be a rose? Good Lord, well I’m jiggered—it’s a tomato.”
The food, in fact, was excellent, and Freddie became more converted as course succeeded course, though he still lamented the absence of what he called
“proper” food, such as steak-and-kidney pudding.
At half past nine, which was the time when he and Winnie always retired to bed, Uncle Freddie downed his regulation whisky. He patted his tummy—a firm and rounded one—with the air of a man greeting a familiar friend.
“Do you know,” he said to Frank in a confiding way, “during the war—the Great War, that is—my mother took me to see a doctor, a most eminent man, and he said I had a weak heart. Something a bit iffy about the valves—I forget now. Well, I think, considering, that I haven’t done too badly—ninety years old. What do you think, Frank?”
“I think,” Frank replied, “that we will bring you and Winnie here again. But that time it will be for your one hundredth birthday, Freddie.”
This made Freddie very pink in the face. He pressed Frank’s hands, then, recovering himself, shook hands energetically.
“You have a very nice husband, Vicky,” Winnie said as I followed them out to the foot of the stairs. “A very nice husband indeed. Freddie and I chose very well for you—didn’t we, Freddie?”
They began to mount the stairs to their room, with the firm intention—Winnie said—of watching for the comet from their bedroom window. The fact that it was a cloudy night, with poor visibility, made no difference to Winnie, who remained a woman of undaunted spirit. She expected the comet, I think, to oblige her by passing directly outside her window at a slow, highly visible pace.
“Will there be sparks, Freddie?” she said when they were halfway up.
“I can’t remember, Winnie. I don’t think there are sparks.”
“Oh, I do hope there will be.” Winnie sounded wistful. “Lots of sparks, and a big tail. Do you know what I think, Freddie? I think it will look exactly like a flying bomb—yes, that’s it! Like a doodlebug, Freddie …”
“We won’t see it, you know,” Frank said in a regretful voice some while later. We had put on coats; we were on the terrace.
Frank looked up at the sky in a melancholy way.
“You can hardly see the moon. I can’t see a single star. The only way anyone is going to see that comet tonight is with a radiotelescope.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s there. We know it’s there, even if we can’t see it.”
“I suppose so.” Frank, the scientist, did not seem convinced by this. “I’d like to have seen it once. Just once. After all—every seventy-six years. We shall never be able to see it again.”
“Max and Hannah may—they can watch it for us.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I half believe it. Yes. I feel as if, tonight, I’m watching for all the people who saw it here last time. For my mother and father, my grandparents. For Maud, Montague Stern and Constance, Steenie and Boy, Jenna. All of them.” I looked around the empty terrace. “Yes. I do feel that.”
“Let’s walk.” Frank took my hand. “Shall we? Shall we walk—oh, a long way? I’d like to do that. I don’t want to go back in there.”
“No, neither do I. Let’s walk. I love to walk at night.” So we left the terrace; we set off down the path toward the lake. At first we walked side by side; then—as often happened when we took walks together—Frank drew ahead. Neither of us minded this: Frank’s strides were longer than mine. He still walked, as my uncle Steenie had once said, with a certain lack of moderation. He had a questing walk; he liked always to press on, to the next bend or the next vantage point. I liked to walk more slowly, sometimes looking back.
There were still swans on the lake—white ones now. We watched them stealing upon us out of the dark—silent, white, like beautiful ghosts, the cleft between the arch of their wings as black as ebony.
We walked on. I watched the clouds scud across the face of the moon. I watched the trees move. The air was damp against my skin. I thought, with affection, of the dead. I thought of those who had died most recently: Wexton, and (a few years before him) Jenna. Jenna, whom I had succeeded in tracing, some years after my marriage; Jenna, whom I had last seen in the center of her new family, with her husband, her stepchildren, her grandchildren. Jenna had found happiness in the end, and I was glad of that.
I thought of those I had lost before this, in the middle period of my life: of Steenie, and of Constance. I thought of those who had died even longer ago: my own parents, an uncle I never knew except at second hand, Frank’s lost family. So many ghosts: there, and yet absent. I wished they had been more substantial; I would have liked to speak to them.
“Not through the woods,” Frank called as we approached them.
“No, not through the woods. Shall we take that track?”
“Where does it lead?”
“We took it once, with Freddie’s greyhounds. It goes on for miles. Out of the valley, up onto the plain. It goes as far as the circle, farther maybe. When we took it, we stopped up there, on the hill.”
“The circle? The stone circle? I’ve never seen that. How far is it?”
“Four miles. Five, maybe.”
“Shall we do it? I want to walk a long way tonight. On and on, without stopping.”
And so we walked on. It was a wide cart-track, clearly defined. The moon gave just enough light to show the path winding ahead, out of the Winterscombe valley and up to that harsher landscape beyond.
As we walked, the wind strengthened; the sky began to clear. We saw, first, the polestar, then—as if they were being unveiled for our benefit—the brightness of the constellations. I thought: Cassiopeia, Orion, the twins Castor and Pollux. It was perhaps then that I decided to write down the story of my parents, and of Constance.
When thinking of this idea before, I had discussed it once or twice with Frank. I think he read my mind, and knew I was thinking of it then, as we walked. We crested one rise. We began to mount a second.
“If I did write it down, Frank—”
“Winterscombe?”
“Yes, Winterscombe. Where should I begin?”
“Oh, I know that. That’s easy. You must begin with the fortuneteller.”
“The fortuneteller? Why?”
“Well, you should begin with magic, I think.”
“Why magic?”
“Because of all the other magic, of course. Wasn’t there magic when Constance was ill and then recovered? When your father recovered, come to that? What happened to your mother in those caves? What was it I sensed, back there in that wood? All those things are magic. So begin with the magic. Begin with your fortuneteller.”
“Do you believe in magic?”
“Certainly.”
“Even though you are a scientist?”
“Perhaps because I am a scientist. And when you get to us”—he paused—“be sure to mention the arithmetic….”
I smiled. Frank strode on ahead. He stopped at the summit of the hill. I watched the figure of my husband outlined against the sky. Whatever it was he could see from this vantage point seemed to please him, for he lifted his arms. One of his odd, impulsive gestures, half triumph, half jubilation. I watched him with love as he moved against the sky. I walked on, and as I reached the top he held out his hand to me.
“Look this way first.”
I turned and looked back to Winterscombe. The moonlight was stronger now, the terrain clear. I could see the bowl of the valley, the dark thread of the river bellying out into the lake, the shelter of the belt of woodland, and the great mass of the house, its black roofs, its bays, its turrets, its ranked windows and their lights.
“Now this way.”
He turned me to face the other way. I drew in my breath. There, at the base of the bare and treeless hills, was the monument. A huge and lonely circle of stones, a place prehistory: The stones were white as bones in the moonlight.
Beyond the pillars and their immense capitals, the clouds banked on the horizon, the night sky above them clear. As we looked I saw those clouds were edged with light: Their extremities, frayed, diffuse, constantly in motion, gathering, dissipating, were tinged with an unearthly and sulfurous luminosity. They wer
e at once massed and striated.
This silenced us. We watched the clouds thicken, converge, disperse.
“Is it the comet, Frank? Is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I never thought it would look like that. There, and not there.”
“Neither did I.”
We stood watching some time longer. The moon rose, and as its light grew stronger, the discoloration of the clouds grew less intense. What had been burnished faded to an opalescent silver, then to gray, and finally to black.
“Look at us. How small we are.”
Frank looked at the sweep of the hills.
“Small—and large. Both at once. Do you feel that?”
“Yes. I do.”
“I want to walk down there. All the way down.” He pointed to the monument. “I want to stand there tonight, right in the center of that circle. With you.”
He began to walk down the hill at a fast pace. The wind whipped his hair about his face. Frank, always indifferent to the elements, ignored this.
I looked one last time back, toward the lights of Winterscombe, the enclosure of its valley. Frank turned; he waited for me.
I ran down to join him. He took my hand once more, and hand in hand, the wind in our faces, we walked down toward the circle of stones.
About the Author
Sally Beauman was born in Devon, England, and is a graduate of Cambridge University. She began her career as a critic and writer for New York magazine and continued to write for leading periodicals in the US and the UK after returning to England. In 1970, she became the first recipient of the Catherine Pakenham Award for journalism, and at the age of twenty-four, was appointed editor of Queen magazine. Beauman has written for the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, and Telegraph Magazine, where she was arts editor.